Fancy (programming language)

Fancy is a pure object-oriented programming language that is heavily influenced by Smalltalk and Ruby. The language is currently under development as an open source project by Christopher Bertels.^[1]

Development

The language has been in development since the beginning of 2010 and has changed from a C++-based interpreter to be running on Rubinius, a dynamic bytecode virtual machine and implementation for the Ruby programming language.^[2]. Thus Fancy supports seamless integration with Ruby and any Ruby libraries.

Language characteristics

Fancy is a dynamic programming language,^[1] meaning that it will execute tasks at runtime that many languages would perform during compilation. Fancy is a garbage-collected language, like Java or Ruby.^[3] The goals of Fancy as a programming language are to be easily understandable by programming beginners, and to perform well enough to be used as a scripting language in Unix environments.^[4]

Fancy and Ruby

Fancy is implemented on top of Rubinius, the Ruby VM, and therefore integrates well with Ruby.^[4] Since Fancy is built on Ruby objects, the authors decided to allow access to the original Ruby classes by using a different syntax.^[5] For this reason, Fancy can be extended easily to use Ruby libraries, or any of the C-extensions that are native to Ruby. Recently, a Ruby Gem was released for automated installation of the language.^[6]

Author

Christopher Bertels is a Computer Science and Philosophy student at the University of Osnabruck in Germany.^[7] He has been working on the Fancy language for around a year, and has spoken about Fancy at the 2010 Ruby and Rails European conference^[4] and the Emerging Languages Camp at OSCON.^[8][9]

Features

• Class definitions that are also used as namespaces (via nested classes)
• Loop-, Iteration- & common Collection methods (including next/break)
• Closures (Blocks)
• A simple package management system, similar to RubyGems
• Simple pattern matching
• Easy reflection (as in Ruby)
• Literal support for Regular Expressions, Arrays, Tuples, Ranges, Hashes (Dictionaries), Blocks, Integers, Floats, Symbols, (Multiline) Strings and more
• Exception Handling
• Dynamically scoped variables (like Common Lisp)
• A bootstrapped (self-hosted, completely in Fancy written) compiler for generating Rubinius bytecode
• Easy integration with Ruby: Calling out to any Ruby libraries that run on Rubinius, including most C-extensions

Implementation

The implementation of the current release is a runtime using the Rubinius virtual machine, meaning that the language is running on the same platform as Ruby, and is accompanied by a self-hosted (bootstrapped compiler) that generated Rubinius bytecode. To allow more simple cross-platform development, nearly all of the standard library is written in Fancy itself.^[10]

Examples

 "hello world!" println

 5 times: { "hello world!" println }

 var method1: param1 . method2

 var ruby_method1(param1) ruby_method2()

 class Person {
   read_write_slots: ['name, 'age, 'country]
   "Creates a new Person instance with the given name, age and country."
   p = Person new
   p name: name
   p age: age
   p country: country
   p
 }

 class Outer {
   class Inner {
     class InnerMost {
       def football {
         "football"
       }
     }
   }
 }
 instance = Outer Inner InnerMost new
 instance football println

References